GitHub for Windows given a shiny new look for version 2

New version is sleeker and speedier, and it supports emoji.

Two years ago, GitHub released GitHub for Windows, a Metro-styled graphical interface for managing git version control. Today, the company released GitHub for Windows version 2.

Version 2 introduces an all-new look. It's still a minimalist, Metro-style interface, but it's even more pared down than it was before; where the old interface used shading, the new one depends even more heavily on whitespace and positioning.

The concept behind the redesign is to give a more focused, concentrated view on the things that developers care about. The old application had developers jumping between a range of different screens to perform different operations; this is much reduced in the new version. For example, to commit changes to a repository, the old application switched to a dedicated "commit" view. The new one performs the commit from within the main view.

The main view shows commits to the repository.

The main view shows commits to the repository.

When you perform a commit, the right-hand side changes to show your changes.

With those changes committed, I can sync with the remote repository. Note the sync icon and the 1/1 in the top right; that means I have one local change that remote doesn't have, and remote has 1 change my local copy doesn't have.

Since its release, git support on Windows has become more abundant, with Microsoft building support into Visual Studio itself, arguably making GitHub for Windows a little less important. However, GitHub tells Ars that this isn't the case and that there continues to be interest in the application, with more than 1.2 million installs recorded.

While the application continues to be usable with any git repository, it has a few new features for GitHub users. GitHub enables commit messages to include emoji and GIF images. Both of these are now supported in the Windows app. It now also includes built-in support for GitHub's large list of ignore templates to make it quicker to set up new projects.